Historically, there has been much thought as to how an individual's environment and ecology (e.g., its resources, competitors, predators and simbionts) influence them, both developmentally and evolutionarily, to produce adaptive traits (Baldwin 1896; Schmalhausen 1949; Waddington 1959). However, it is still unclear how - and in what situations - the environment plays a creative role in phenotypic evolution. Thus, my research goals are driven by these two questions:

How do environmental and endogenous signals interact to generate novel phenotypic variation? and What are the ecological and evolutionary consequences of this variation? Specifically, I have been investigating,